Pre-doors-open safety systems inspection log
Problem
Before doors open, someone, usually the duty manager or a control room supervisor, walks the venue to check fire points, defibrillator cabinets, emergency lighting, exit signage and evacuation routes are clear. The result is reported over the radio as a single word: "clear." Nothing is written down beyond a tick on a paper walk sheet that gets filed, if it survives the day, in a folder nobody revisits. When a local authority inspection, an insurer, or a post-incident review later asks whether a specific evacuation route was checked and when, the honest answer is that someone remembers doing it. The safety certificate conditions assume this check happens before every fixture. What is missing is proof that it did.
Product idea
A mobile checklist built for the pre-doors-open walk, organised by zone and by system: fire points, defibrillator cabinets, emergency lighting, exit signage, evacuation routes. Each item is checked off by the person standing in front of it, with a photograph attached where the item calls for one and a fault flagged with severity if something is missing or damaged. A flagged fault pushes a message to the control room immediately rather than waiting for the inspector to finish the round. The walk is signed off by name and timestamp when complete, and the control room readiness view shows which zones are still outstanding. It works offline, because plant rooms and back-of-house corridors are exactly where signal drops, and syncs once the phone reconnects. It does not decide whether the venue is safe to open; that judgement stays with the duty manager.
Who it is for
Duty managers and control room supervisors who run the pre-doors-open walk, and the event director who has to confirm the venue is ready to open without waiting on a radio call from every zone.
Possible first version
A mobile web app with a configurable checklist template per zone, offline capture with photo attachment, a fault list with severity and immediate push to a control room view, sign-off by name and timestamp, and an exportable PDF evidence pack per matchday. Version one does not integrate with the incident logging tool or the radio system; a flagged fault is visible on screen and still needs a radio call or a message to reach someone who is not looking at the app. Zone templates are set up once per venue rather than pulled from a venue management system.
- Build classification
- Workflow application
- Rough effort
- 3-5 week first release
- Roles involved
- Duty manager, Control room supervisor, Event director
- Relevant to
- Venue & stadium operator, Professional club, League office, Collegiate athletics
- Systems in play
- Run sheets and checklists, Radio and communications systems, Incident logging tools
- Product framing
- Verify or inspect
Questions we get asked
What do we need to have ready before the first walk is logged?
A list of what actually gets checked at your venue: the fire points, defibrillator locations, exit routes and signage, by zone. Most venues already have this on a paper walk sheet or in a safety file, and it becomes the checklist template. No wiring into other systems is needed to start, only that list and the names of who is authorised to sign off a zone.
Does this replace our incident logging tool?
No. It sits upstream of it, capturing the routine pre-doors-open check rather than the incident itself. If a fault is serious enough to become an incident, that still gets logged in your existing tool. This tool gives you the record that the check happened and when the fault was first spotted, which most incident logs do not carry today.
Our duty manager already carries a radio and a paper sheet. Why add a phone to that?
Because the radio call and the paper sheet are the problem, not a working alternative. The radio call disappears once spoken and the paper sheet gets filed unread. If checking a box on a phone screen takes longer than checking a box on paper, this will not get adopted and should not be forced. The test in a prototype is whether the walk takes the same time as today's, with a record left behind that today's does not produce.
What happens if a fault is found five minutes before doors open?
The fault is flagged and pushed to the control room view straight away, without waiting for the round to finish, so the duty manager does not find out at the end of a twenty-minute walk that something needed fixing at the start. The tool does not decide whether to delay the opening or how to remediate. That decision, and the authority to make it, stays with the duty manager and event director as it does today.
Is this your workflow?
Tell us one sports workflow that still runs on paper, spreadsheets, WhatsApp or an outdated system. We will map it and show you what a simpler product looks like.
Tell us about itMore in Matchday & competition operations
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